Saturday, May 31, 2014

The Problem with Memory Lane

Is that things don’t stay the same. OB’s Board in Truckee is
gone and the town seems to have gone over to fru-fru shopping and gastronomy.
The town was founded, actually, as a railhead and trains still rumble through regularly
and it’s been a tourist trap of the genteel sort for a long time. So what’s the
problem? I’m not sure. We bought four hours of parking and used half that
before moving on to another local, and more blatant, tourist trap, Virginia
City.

The Truckee Hotel, we actually stayed here after dropping our daughter at school in Colorado in 2005

I rather liked this change, a Flying A station restored to 1949

Now, beneath the hokum, there is some history in Virginia
City, as you will see, but there is a lot of hoke along with it. In fact, they
now offer staged gunfights just like in Tombstone. WTF?? But, if you’re paying
attention as you have read this blog, you realise that Sharon and I have a very
high tolerance for tourist traps, as long as they come with humor, irony or
some other kind of spicing. Virginia City pours it all on in heaps, like a
student essay with tons of data and no thesis.

Notwithstanding the name, they refused us a free dinner.

Off the main street there are some nicely restored public and private buildings

Like the schoolhouse

And sometimes history is at ground level

We were divided on what Twain, who edited the Territorial Enterprise from 1862-64 would have thought of this

Tomorrow, Saturday, will be our last day out on this trip.
We plan to drive to one of the far reaches of the lake with a picnic.